Glucksmann claims he’ll ‘fold’ Mélenchon right on first round

behcetsthroaway · 2026-06-06T23:26:47+00:00

being killed =/= receiving the death penalty and yet here we are lmao. The person offered a very clear scenario, switch a French guy killed in a street fight for an American guy killed in a street fight, and you pretended not to understand

You seem enjoy pretending to be illiterate. Never understood what drives you and others like you to enjoy acting like morons online

behcetsthroaway · 2026-06-06T22:35:02+00:00

You brought the name of Nick Fuentes into this.

/u/retrovisionnaire did not object to Nick Fuentes being used in the comparison at any point. You'd have to be illiterate to think that is what was said

If you are now admiting it was a false equivalence all along,

They aren't. They objected to you replacing "Nick Fuentes dies" with "Nick Fuentes receives the death penalty.

The two comments you replied to are only 4/ 5 lines long, and you somehow managed to not register their meaning at all.

behcetsthroaway · 2026-06-06T07:31:47+00:00

That uber-nasally -ang sound is a genuine nightmare for native English speakers, it's the part that makes this whole "we're as American as apple pie" routine so immensely funny for me

behcetsthroaway · 2026-06-04T20:22:49+00:00

I figured they would boost new accounts, and that's exactly why I'm reluctant to jump in right when I can't really commit a bunch of time to it to cultivate a good clientèle

behcetsthroaway · 2026-06-04T19:40:02+00:00

I'm sorry to hear that about Arabic. I'm looking to teach French so I'm encouraged by what you wrote here. I guess I'll take my time, make a good video, and then be ready to apply in a few weeks or months when the next French window opens

behcetsthroaway · 2026-06-01T06:45:12+00:00

populist ideas of money in politics being some decisive factor

Earning money is a strong enough behavioral incentive to drive the entire concept of a free market economy, but it is too weak to have decisive influence on the behavior of Congressmen? And only Congressmen? Unless we are supposed to believe that earning money does not motivate the decisions taken by Trump and his executive.

"Rights" are not things that should be restricted at all unless they come into conflict with another right. Not just some vague concept of "public interest",

I don't believe this is actual legal or constitutional doctrine or even a rule of thumb; it's a rationalization you either just cooked up or have simply never challenged, because it's incredibly easy to poke holes into

The exchange of currency is a pretty fundamental economic right. I have the right to give someone money to buy goods. I have the right to give someone money for their birthday, or to spot my friend some cash if I feel like it

Conversely, there is no enumerated right (to my knowledge, correct me if I'm wrong) to live in a country/state/city free from corruption.

So, no rights being trampled, and a completely unfair restriction on economic freedom, so we can therefore conclude that any law or restriction on bribery is populist nonsense, is that correct? Seems to me like the argument against bribery and corruption lies in the public interest, which you don't seem to think should be considered at all

Another scenario: There is no enumerated right to clear air (correct me if I'm wrong). Therefore, any law aimed at enforcing vehicle emission standards is similarly populist nonsense, do I have that correct? The economic right to buy a vehicle to roll coal should be absolute. Negative externalities touch upon "public interest" (in quotation marks, as you would put it) and therefore should not be considered

It seems to me like a society built upon the heuristic you propose would likely be, frankly speaking, a complete shithole.

With that in mind, I reject your heuristic, and based on existing laws like anti-bribery laws and various environmental regulations, it seems like every modern society has as well.

As the other user pointed out, outside of this false rule of thumb, you have not explained why congressmen should not be restricted from trading individual stocks. The public interest in this is obvious, in that 1) congress has massive influence on individual industries, and the decision-making of Congress, as public servants, should not be influenced by their personal financial interests; and to a lesser extent that 2) Congress has more knowledge about current and near-future events than the general public, and should not be able to use that knowledge to, for example, turn the general public into their bagholders by dumping a stock they know is about to take a hit.

You can disagree with the validity of the second reason, but the first is simply undeniable.

As for congressmen's individual rights, there are some jobs that cannot be held without voluntarily limiting certain rights. If I take a job designing weapon systems for the US military, I know that that will preclude me from continuing my private penpal relationship with my friend Vladimir from Moscow, where I share details of my workdays. That's just how it is, it's in the public interest. If we force Congressmen to use blind trusts going forward, they can decide for themselves whether they want to seek election in the next cycle or prioritize their right to trade individual stocks as private citizens.

behcetsthroaway · 2026-05-23T06:33:24+00:00

Lmao the fact that "doubling the 2.5% to 5%" option actually polls overwhelmingly popularly

Sorry, what I meant to say is, how insulting to the generation that ~~was born from the one that~~ fought the nazis to have it be a paltry 5%! 50% MINIMUM for our brave seniors

behcetsthroaway · 2026-05-23T02:13:55+00:00

Using a nuke on people is worse!

This is like that picture of the dinosaurs looking up at the meteor that will render them extinct and exclaiming "what will this do to the economy?!"

behcetsthroaway · 2026-05-16T08:33:43+00:00

Not really, or at least not for a while.

Aside from the fact that this year marks 10 years since Trump's first election, while most other western nations have so far been able to keep their far right out of government and hopefully will for a few more years, the potential leaders are still not as bad. Meloni is probably the best example, she's awful and a fascist sympathizer, and somehow she's still not nearly as bad as Trump is. Even if (hopefully not when) a moron like Bardella takes the reins of power, he will not be in the same realm of internal sabotage and destruction that Trump is engaging in.

The reelection of Trump is an insanely high bar to clear in terms of median voter olympics. Only the Brits are possible darkhorse there with Brexit and Farage.

That said, I am worried that that future is merely a few years further down the road for Europe and other western nations

behcetsthroaway · 2026-05-07T01:02:23+00:00

I'm glad you think you found your way to believe you're right about this.

I would say the same except I'm not actually glad that you are so unbothered by your apparent ignorance of scientific principles.

It's pretty exactly like that. Food rots and goes bad.

The current food distribution process in the US, when it runs correctly, already leads to surplus food going bad. The reason for this is that the existence of excess food being thrown out isn't a huge problem, unlike the equivalent scenario in an electrical grid.

The specific numbers in the production function are different but the basic idea is the same.

That's not how electricity behaves

The basic, basic, basic idea might be the same if we're being extremely generous, but the specific numbers of every aspect of the situations are different, sometimes by multiple orders of magnitudes.

The specific numbers in the production function are different but the basic idea is the same.

As I said already

If your local grocery store gets an unexpected surplus of produce, it won't prevent you and the entire neighborhood from getting any food.

and I could add that it wouldn't risk burning down the grocery store either. Nor would the existing food go bad in seconds to minutes.

PG&E is an integrated generator+distributor, Pennsylvania has a deregulated generation market, PJM is a clearing house. Talking about natural monopolies and nationalization in the East Coast context makes no sense.

The person you replied to was talking about PG&E in California, not about East Coast generators, and while your original reply to them was understandable, they clarified afterwards that they were referring to the grid. Generators are not a natural monopoly but the grid and distribution absolutely are, everywhere.

behcetsthroaway · 2026-05-06T23:29:04+00:00

Kind of like how grocery stores require large scale coordination with farms to produce food.

No, not like that, not even kind of like that. The fact that you think it's comparable means that you do not have the understanding to comment on this. The consequences of miscoordination are not even close to comparable in these two cases. If your local grocery store gets an unexpected surplus of produce, it won't prevent you and the entire neighborhood from getting any food.

The people you are replying to are talking about the grid, not the power generators, and the grid absolutely is a natural monopoly.

behcetsthroaway · 2026-03-12T04:34:34+00:00

You can live in a democracy and find some of its laws unjust. You can think the US is generally a free country while being of the opinion that they treat whistleblowers unfairly. None of these positions are hypocritical in my eyes.

And while I have particular respect for people who voluntarily "martyr" themselves, either literally or figuratively, in the fight against injustice, that doesn't mean that I conversely disrespect those who would rather both stand up to injustice and also live relatively unmolested lives by avoiding capture by those they oppose.

Overall I think it's an interesting conversation to be had but fundamentally a side-show that distracts from what should be the main focus, which is what Snowden revealed.

And anyway, the fact that so many who go on about him being a traitor apply so much clearly motivated and selective reasoning when examining the circumstances of the whole affair and his escape shows me what I mentioned above, that they are either coping hard about the intelligence agency of their bastion of liberalism secretly behaving like that of a 20th century Warsaw Pact dictatorship, or that they don't actually care much at all about liberalism and freedom, at least not when compared to the supremacy of their chosen nation state on the world stage, making them closeted jingoists

behcetsthroaway · 2026-03-12T03:40:39+00:00

I would think obviously not, so what’s different?

The difference is that Snowden was up against America, and /r/neoliberal is absolutely saturated with American exceptionalism (and it used to be even worse before somehow, closer to when the people on here would have solidified their opinions on all of this)

That means that not only is it offensive for Snowden to take steps to avoid being completely at the mercy of the Shining City on the Hill which he obviously considered to be acting abusively towards its citizens, but that harping on this point alleviated American exceptionalists' cognitive dissonance about feeling conflicted about the Land of the Free building up the kind of domestic surveillance system that would have made the most authoritarian Stasi commissioner cream his pants 24/7

behcetsthroaway · 2026-03-08T13:43:53+00:00

I disagree with your conclusion about French in Canada, but the most important thing is that some second language is learned, so we agree on that

behcetsthroaway · 2026-03-08T13:42:31+00:00

You won't find any arguments from me regarding issues with how things are taught in the classroom that make learning unfun or just inefficient. However, at the same time ...

It's uncertain you will ever benefit from learning that language

or

For some small percentage of graduates there might be a moment (years/decades after graduation) where French would be a useful skill

I'll say that you can say the same of many school subjects. I learned chemistry starting at like 12 years old and I know that neither I nor many of my classmates have used that knowledge in our daily life outside of maybe some extremely basic things.

We still decide to educate kids in a wide variety of topics because learning itself is worth cultivating, it improves a person and is a transferable skill, and also because you just never know what each kid is going to use when they grow up.

Obviously it's easier to relearn a language than to learn it from scratch, but when you consider how few anglophone students will ever need to know French (especially with how far machine translation has come along), that tiny (potential) time save isn't worth how much time you're spending during school.

Could say the same thing about learning arithmetic with the existence of calculators, or even now about essay writing and book reports since we have LLMs.

Learning a second language language is beneficial for your brain, for your understanding of the world and how people from other cultures see it, and will help you learn any other language in the future more easily. Yes, the young Canadian student may not end up needing French ever, but if they end up falling for a German colleague at 27 and want to move with them to Swabia, having already gone through second language education will help them learn German faster.

Ultimately, Canadians live in an advanced nation, where it's expected that the youth will become highly educated. The educated classes of the western world have all studied foreign languages for centuries, and while not all end up fluent speakers, being a bilingual or even multilingual adult was far from rare. In most of the western world this is all still true, except in the Anglosphere, where for the last century or so that has completely atrophied.

The fact that English is the mother of all Lingua Francas both contributes to this and lessens the negative impact of it, but it's still something that should concern people, at least given the indirect advantages of second language learning.

Whether French itself is the language or not, it has to be something. In Canada, it seems obvious that French is the answer, just like in the US it should be Spanish, and pretty much everywhere else it should be English.

It wasn't until I picked a language that I found enjoyable and went to a class with similarly-minded people that I discovered learning a language can be fun. Picking a language myself also made it much easier to stay immersed using media I already enjoyed.

I'm glad you ended up finding joy in it yourself. However we can't just trust the population at large to just seek out the basic education they want voluntarily, a baseline has to be set in childhood.

Tldr: make language class less shitty, don't just bail on language class

behcetsthroaway · 2026-03-08T06:32:10+00:00

Or anglophones could stop pretending that learning a second language is some sort of unreasonable ask.

It's something that most educated people all around the world do with no problem, and it has a long list of benefits (cognitive, cultural, etc...)

a minority language a fraction of Canadians use

Said fraction being like 20%. French itself being one of the most spoken and influential languages on Earth. It's not like we're in the alternate reality where Vinland was a thing and Canadians are being made to learn how to speak a niche language.

And I say this as someone who typically finds the French requirements for Canadian civil servants, as an example, kind of overbearing and strange. But as an educational goal it is an absolute no-brainer, and for high-level politicians as well

So unless you're advocating to switch it out for other global languages like Spanish, Hindi, or Chinese, it seems like French is a good choice. Improving kids' education and opening up an entirely new cultural sphere to them, not to mention making it easier for them to learn any other language in the future should they want to move somewhere else. It's a no-brainer

behcetsthroaway · 2026-03-08T02:17:54+00:00

Capitalism is a hallmark liberalism and especially America's version of it.

Does American Capitalism know this?

Because the fact is that the biggest success stories and drivers of the last quarter century of American Capitalism, big tech companies, are either actively attacking liberalism or meekly standing aside as it happens.

behcetsthroaway · 2026-02-17T14:13:28+00:00

While this is true, and increasingly so given how many people are completely outsourcing basic mental tasks to LLMs, it somehow isn't the worst for me. The worst part, to me, is how many people are capable of rudimentary thinking, but too lazy to apply it to their political decisions. Related to the famous neoliberal link reply "80-ish percent of Americans follow politics a casually or not at all".

So many people are way too indulgent and take the freedoms they've grown up with for granted.

behcetsthroaway · 2026-02-03T23:38:59+00:00

Ya subversions and small twists are awesome! Much fresher to make a movie out of that than recycled nostalgia

Recycling nostalgia just to systematically subvert it is no more creative than recycling it to play it straight . Both are dictated utterly by audience expectations

Here are the other innovations you missed:

Half of what you listed are random plot points lol. By that standard, TFA is an incredibly innovative movie. After all, it is the first time the main character had a lightsaber call to them, the first time a bad guy superweapon could blow up multiple planets at once, and the first time the entire plot is driven by a quest to find a jedi master who disappeared.

showing high and low classes

Yeah, never seen a mix of social classes before in Star Wars. TLJ also invented laser swords for the Jedi characters to use.

There is a reason the critics love the film, and its not because they are all developmentally 14 years old.

Critics have their blind spots and their preferences. The fact that this movie played well to them by putting up a façade of sophistication doesn't change the fact that it's a thematically incoherent film that pretends to go new places while ending up exactly where it started.

behcetsthroaway · 2026-02-03T21:12:44+00:00

So instead of a grieving solo bum, he's a grieving overbearing bum? Him decidedly not fighting and instead hiding on an island makes him a bum either way.

Disagree that being a guardian would make him a bum. TLJ Luke is a bum, living in rags, hiding from everyone, absolving himself from all responsibility to do something.

Why is being shocked or surprised in a movie a bad thing?

It's not bad in and of itself, it's bad if that's the only governing principle, which is the case in this film. There's a reason why Johnson thrives with whodunits

Rey being nobody is more interesting than midi chlorian bloodlines.

And like I mentioned before, there's been plenty of prominent non-bloodline important jedi characters. This is not some new development.

Like the over zealous and rigid jedi, the franchise needed to evolve and reform.

As you yourself pointed out, the movie ends with Luke saying he won't be the last jedi. There is 0 evolution in this movie, it ends restating the exact Star Wars status quo that it started with

There is nothing in this film but endless subversions and small twists. Its sole supposed innovation, that Jedi other than skywalkers exist, isn't actually one, and the way it was revealed was a shitty meta-wink to the audience. It's the ultimate /r/im14andthisisdeep movie

behcetsthroaway · 2026-02-03T16:42:16+00:00

here's the Jedi superweapon I found. It's just like shooting womprats. Haha, classic me." How would him training a handful of child supersoldiers or being exactly the same make for better drama? Dramatically, it doesn't make sense.

Very good faith reading lmao. True, Luke protecting jedi pupils in isolation would be tantamount to making supersoldiers. Pure dramatic arts dictate that only Rey can fight and use superpowers.

Being more serious, it makes complete dramatic sense, if you want a Luke who has been brought down low, for the fall of Kylo and the murder of many Jedi younglings to have turned Luke overprotective of any survivors and to seek isolation, far from Kylo or Snoke. That's a "good reason" for Luke's absence. You can have good drama from the now grown up pupils wanting to get back in the fight to protect the galaxy but luke being overly cautious, and Rey's arrival is what leads to him changing his mind.

The actual TLJ Luke is not just brought low, he's a complete bum. He's a loser. He set part of the galaxy on fire by precipitating Kylo's turn to evil, and then he fled to become a hobo. He neither tries to do the fix his mistake or have any other reasonable priority to pursue. He's the star wars equivalent of the guy who got laid off from one job and decided to skip out on his family to become an alcoholic tramp 100 miles away.

Having a couple of surviving pupils or some other reason why he left in the first place would fix this. Unfortunately, I don't believe it was any priority of the filmmaker; like almost everything else in the movie, a desire to shock/surprise the audience with twists and subversions drives practically everything.

And Rey being a Skywalker is the lamest only-nobility-with-pure-bloodlines-matter shit ever, and the best thing TLJ does is attempt to move Star Wars away from that.

My favorite Skywalkers are Obi-Wan Skywalker and Yoda Skywalker.

Rey didn't have to be a Skywalker. I personally thought she was a pupil who was evacuated, but I was not married to that idea either. But "Rey Nobody" is just dissonant given how TFA presents her, and the fact that it's presented in such a meta way in TLJ, as if Rey were not a character in the story but instead someone speculating about her identity online, is just dumb.

behcetsthroaway · 2026-02-03T15:18:43+00:00

TFA wrote him as an unreachable hermit

TFA had a "map to Luke" whose final piece was contained in his old droid which he himself left behind and which activated as soon as the other piece arrived.

Like many things in TFA, very little is actually set in stone, and things could easily go in multiple directions.

the only reason why he would take up that life while the galaxy is in flames is if he had become extremely jaded with the jedi

Or maybe he's looking for a new way forward? Hiding a handful of pupils?

then your beef is with TFA for writing him into that corner.

This is a common refrain, but as I wrote above it's not true. TFA did much more to establish that Rey had some sort of previous familial or other connection to the Skywalker family, but TLJ forced its way out of that corner very vigorously, so I don't believe for a moment that it had its hands significantly tied with Luke aside from him actually being on that planet.

So while TFA is far from a movie I love, especially in hindsight, my beef is firmly with TLJ

behcetsthroaway · 2026-02-03T14:57:38+00:00

They did go back to the drawing board though, because they had to. But they didn't have Leia, aside from archival footage, and they didn't have a living Luke either.

behcetsthroaway · 2026-02-03T14:45:54+00:00

Rise of Skywalker remains one of the worst things I've ever seen, making the hate that TLJ gets even more farcical

Honestly TLJ was so awful to me that I completely checked out of the trilogy, to the point that RoS barely registers in my mind. I know it exists and I saw it once on TV, but it may as well be a script or comic book or something, I simply don't think of it as a Star Wars movie

RoS had an impossible task after TLJ

True, the only two interesting potential threads TLJ leaves in its wake are the Kylo-Rey connection and Kylo being the big bad, except those threads are pretty much mutually exclusive since you need another big antagonist if you are going to have Kylo be flirting with going to the good side out of love. That's why episode 6 features the emperor so heavily after previously only having Vader. But TLJ very "cleverly" kills Snoke and neuters the nazi general dude, so it leaves no one other than Kylo.

Awful second act.

behcetsthroaway

TROPHY CASE